to order, but are slowly developed by much reading and thinking and doing and no little contact with wholesome people. In Charles Francis Adams’ pungent address, at Cambridge in 1883, he said, “In these days of repeating rifles, my alma mater sent me and my classmates out into the strife equipped with shields and swords and javelins. We were to grapple with living questions through the medium of the dead languages.” While thus sharply criticizing the content of the curriculum, Mr. Adams would have been the[6] first to maintain that to breathe the atmosphere of a university is an assured way of getting broadened culture, and that this atmosphere is made largely by the teachers. Frederick Douglass had no university degree, but he was certainly a man of culture; his teachers were among the choicest spirits of an aroused generation—Sumner and Garrison and Wendell Phillips—and they gave him breadth and balance and clear-sightedness. Charles Francis Adams was set upon the highway of modern culture despite the curriculum; Douglass received that grace which is of the spirit of literature without the curriculum. Both men were deeply indebted to noble teachers. The thing that makes one man really different from another is not so much knowledge as character; and the thing that makes one school different from another is not so much curriculum and apparatus, as teaching body. Algebra and trigonometry, Greek and Latin, history and political economy, the student will forget; but he will not forget a teacher gentle but earnest, of disinterested scholarship and life-long devotion. The specific teaching may be quite erased from the memory, but in the heart will be left a deepening respect for the teacher.

[6]

Many of you are to become class-room teachers. Remember that teaching ability is an inward endowment; remember that a morally stunted man or a ribbon-loving woman cannot be an effective teacher. The most searching critic of character I ever knew was a barefoot boy whose laughing eyes danced over the pages of the fourth reader; an intuitive philosopher he! School boy opinion has, I doubt not, many vagaries but on the whole its essential decisions as to teachers are amazingly correct. Whether you teach geography by the Oswego Method, is not greatly to the[7] point; whether you have won the confidence of your class—that is the main issue; and that conquest is not made by the sword of discipline but by the spirit of vigorous goodness.

[7]

Moreover the genuine teacher knows that his duty is not bounded by the four walls of the class-room. He is dealing with boys and girls to be 

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